Last Updated: February 14th, 2020
As wedding photographers ourselves, we can’t say we love charging people travel fees – but without them we’d really struggle to make some shoots worth our time. Few other professions will see such a large amount of traveling as that of a wedding photographer. Whether you are just traveling within your own region or to an entirely different country, travel fees help pay for your time and the costs associated with actually traveling such as car repairs, gas for your car, flights, hotels, and so on.
Given our experience charging travel fees to shoot weddings over the past few years, in this article we are going to cover some of the norms we’ve seen in the wedding photography industry, talk about best practices, and discuss what we do to make traveling for weddings make sense for us.
This post will be a perfect source of info if you’re a wedding photographer trying to figure out how to charge for travel, or a bride-to-be trying to better understand all those travel fees you’re hearing about. Continue reading for more!
Wedding Industry Norms & Best Practices for Charging to Travel
When trying to figure out how you should charge travel fees, it’s important to take a step back and take in what other photographers are doing. We’re not saying you need to emulate other photographers to a T, but it’s important to know what others are doing in order to stay competitive.
Based on what we’ve observed, any established and successful wedding photographer is going to charge to travel.
Some newcomers may be more prone to not charging, or waiving fees, in an effort to more easily secure a new client.
As a rule, you need to evaluate your specific situation as it will factor in to how you decide to approach travel costs. This is the single most important thing to consider when it comes down to any pricing you are doing.
From here, we’re going to break down some options available to you and commonly used:
Option #1: Mileage Tax Deduction
Assuming you are operating as a legal business entity (if you’re not, you should do this immediately!), regardless of your approach to charging clients for your travel, you will want to be tracking your mileage in order to receive a tax break for the travel you are doing by car. This can be done in many ways, the simplest of which is MileIQ – which we use to track the distances driven for personal and business purposes.
In 2018, we have over $4,000 we can write off our taxes because of the amount of driving we do at the federal standard rate of .54.5 cents/mile. Doing the math, we’ve driven over 9,000 miles this year alone for business purposes – so no doubt this is a really significant thing.
By tracking your mileage and getting a tax write off, it can help you offset travel costs if you are not wanting to put these on your clients in some instances. Some photographers may opt to not charge a travel fee because this covers it, while others may charge a fee to their clients in addition to logging their mileage for a deduction.
If you want to learn more about MileIQ, check out our review and user guide. You can also sign up and try it now for free, and if you decide to upgrade, you can get 20% off your first year subscription by using our link.
Option #2: Charging a rate per mile OR hour
Whether you decide to track your mileage or not for tax purposes, one way to charge a travel fee to your clients is to charge a flat rate per mile or hour.
It is very common for photographers to simply charge the federal going rate to their clients (so this year = 54.5 cents/mile). This means if you have to travel to a wedding venue 100 miles away, you would charge ~$100 to cover travel expenses as the round trip would end up being 200 miles.
You can apply the same approach to an hourly travel fee. You charge 50$/hour and drive 4 hours round trip, and thus your final cost is 200$.
Option #3: Offer free travel within a limited radius & charge for travel after
A more blended approach to charging travel fees is this one, and it’s actually the way we go ourselves.
What we do is tell our clients upfront that there will be no travel fees when we need to travel within 80 miles (round trip). Any mileage over 80 is billed at .50 cents/mile.
In our experience, this is a way to meet our clients half way.
We understand that as wedding photographers our job requires us to travel (no one is getting married in our backyard – that would honestly be a little weird), but our time is worth something as well – so we charge when it becomes more of a burden on us.
Option #4: Extended travel requirements
We consider “local” shoots to be within a 3 hour radius from where we live. It’s really the most amount of time we’d be fine to be driving in a car one way before wanting to stay the night closer to the wedding location.
Anything that requires more travel than this for us ends up getting into a territory that requires more customization of our travel fee to account for lodging, food, and in some cases (like shoots across the country) – flights and rental cars.
There is, unfortunately, no one size fits all cost for these things as it’s highly dependent on the location the wedding is taking place.
To help you better see how we’d put together a travel fee in an instance like this, let’s look at the following real world example we encountered ourselves:
Example scenario –
We have a client wanting to book their wedding day with us (yay!). Their venue is two states away, and would require 600 miles of driving (round trip). This would end up taking 8-10 hours just for driving alone. This is a full work day in and of itself, and would absolutely require an added cost for us to drive all the way there and back again. Because of the distance and time required to get to the venue, we wouldn’t want to photograph a wedding for 8 hours than turnaround at 11pm and drive 4-5 hours home (it’s just not reasonable). As such, we need to charge not only for our mileage and time, but to cover costs associated with staying at a hotel nearby, and maybe even a small charge to cover some dinner/breakfast while we’re up there.
This seems straightforward enough…but there’s a twist!!
This client wants to have an engagement session (already included in the wedding package), but instead of somewhere local to us, they want it all the way across the country because there is that one place in Oregon that holds a special place in their heart. That’s totally cool with us, because we love traveling, but we also can’t be expected to foot the bill to travel all the way out there. As with the travel costs associated with the wedding day, we’d also be charging for the engagement session – fees will come in to cover our flights, lodging, rental car, food, etc.
As you can see in this scenario, there is a lot of really interesting things going on for a photographer who likes to travel, but at the end of the day – wedding photographers (like ourselves) need to be able to make enough money to cover costs and support themselves (we have to pay bills, you know!).
With this in mind, let us walk you through how we would approach handling travel costs for this detailed scenario (you can let us know in the comments if you’d do something differently!).
How we’d handle this scenario –
The most important factor for us when determining how much we should charge for travel is to make sure all components of travel are accounted for. It’s actually a lot more simple than it may seem at first glance. We break this down for you below.
Wedding Day Travel Fees:
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Drive time/mileage costs (600 miles – 80 miles = 520 miles x .50 cents/mile): 260$
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Toll/admission costs (this isn’t always applicable, but we check the free app Toll Calculator to see how much driving tolls will add up & charge admission costs at locations that require this)
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Hotel stay (would need to charge to cover overnight stay)
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Breakfast/Dinner: 20$ per meal
Remember: in addition to the fees being charged to our client, we are also using MileIQ to track our mileage for a tax credit.
Engagement Session Travel Fees:
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Flights (would need to charge to cover ticket costs)
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Hotel stay (would need to charge to cover at least 2 nights)
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Rental car (would need to charge to cover car)
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Meal stipend (would need to charge to cover meals)
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Drive time/mileage costs (would be charged based on time spent getting to and from engagement session location(s))
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Toll/admission costs (this isn’t always applicable, but we check the free app Toll Calculator to see how much driving tolls will add up & charge admission costs at locations that require this)
As you can imagine, the cost to travel can range from quite low if relatively local, to very high if your client wants to fly you to a different part of the world.
For all our traveling needs (flights, hotels, car rentals), we use Booking.com as they often have the best rates from what we’ve seen.
Where is there flexibility?
This is especially true for new photographers trying to become more established, and who don’t always have the willpower to say “you need to pay for my travel time” to clients about to book with them. We’ve been in this position ourselves many times, and have learned ways to more effectively handle this type of situation.
As we discuss flexibility we may have, remember that this is just our personal approach – and what works for us may not work for you.
Start Here:
Before discussing travel costs with your prospective client, you need to lock down the lowest cost you’d be willing to do business with them in relation to what they are requesting.
This may be a hard number you have for anyone who inquires for your photography service, but it may very well be a number relative to each individual inquiry.
For us, travel fees are essential, but we are open to waiving or decreasing some of them if we really need some new business or our clients are already spending a whole lot on their package (such as by going with our highest wedding photography package).
There is also something to be said when our client is coming across as very reasonable and appreciative of the work we do – and while it isn’t a reason in itself to decrease costs, it is a factor we consider before making a decision.
Knowing the circumstances under which you’d be willing to be more flexible on travel fees before you’re faced with this situation will help you make clearer judgments when the time comes.
For many photographers, given how easily accessible so many of us are thanks to social media, you will likely find yourself with some inquiries involving a good deal of travel – so it’s best to be prepared!
Examples of situations where we’d be flexible to reduce or waive travel fees:
In no particular order, we’re going to highlight some scenarios where we’d be more open to waiving travel fees.
Travel to a place we want to go and can make a vacation out of.
One of our goals as photographers is being able to visit interesting locations already on our bucket list.
In the past few years we’ve traveled to Iceland, Oregon, and other really scenic places. We have some other places high up on our list including New Zealand, The Faroe Islands, Greece…(it’s quite a list honestly).
If we received an inquiry looking for our photography services in one of these locations, we’d be more open to waiving some costs associated with traveling to them – as in the scheme of things we would be able to turn our time there into a vacation, and expense some of the purchases made for business travel as a tax write off.
How much we’d reduce would depend on the specifics…
As a general rule, when traveling by air, we expect at least our flights to be covered. Lodging and rental cars tend to be more affordable, so covering this ourselves is more a possibility if we’re making a reasonable amount of money from the whole package price and get to make a trip out of it.
Our prospective client is budget conscious, but is not asking for discounts and will be booking a higher rated package.
From time to time, prospective clients will make mention of trying to keep their budget at a reasonable level, but really like our work. Often this leads to trimming things out of packages to make it work better for them (such as removal of albums, print credit, etc.).
If the first email received is just asking for a discount, it’s a flat “no” from us – but if we’ve already been back-and-forth and even had a call together, we’re more likely to be willing to work with their budget within reason.
A 40$ travel fee isn’t worth much to us if it ends up being the deterring bullet that makes a client wanting to book a $4,000 package walk away, and sometimes waiving the fee can be the thing that puts them over the edge and book immediately.
We really want to shoot the venue.
On occasion, we get inquiries for weddings to be held at venues we really want to shoot at.
Having a wedding in our portfolio at a particular place is one of the best ways for us to attract new clients in the future that have just booked that venue for their wedding.
In our own little world, one of the venues sitting at the top of our list to shoot is the one we got married at – The Pump House B&B – so any serious inquiry for that location we receive we end up flexible on travel costs in exchange for the opportunity to shoot there.
These are the top 3 reasons why we’d reduce or remove travel costs, what about you?
When to collect travel fee payments?
Once you’ve sorted out if you are going to charge a travel fee or not, and if so – how much, you need to make a decision about how you are going to collect payment.
A few factors that might play into your decision include:
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How much money needs to be collected?
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How far are you traveling?
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How trusting are you of your client (or people in general)?
As a general rule, we require all travel payments to be made upfront – before we do any traveling.
This is critically important for us so we are taken seriously as professionals, and so we have costs associated with traveling already covered before we get in our car and drive for hours and hours, or in longer distance situations – step foot on an airplane.
It might seem like a silly thing, but we’ve heard many stories of photographers being okay to be paid upon arrival, but this is never something guaranteed. The only sure thing is collecting payment upfront and in advance.
Our Approach to Collecting Travel Fees
If we know the travel costs to be associated with the wedding day (or engagement session in packages that include this), we will add the travel fee into our initial contract and invoice.
In cases where we do not know how much the travel will cost, but the client still wants to book with us to secure their wedding day on our calendar – we will invoice them at a later date but before the session/wedding event occurs. At latest, we can usually square away these costs a month in advanced – and sometimes costs change if plans change (ie: bride & groom are no longer getting ready at the wedding venue, but 30 minutes away in a hotel now).
The way we collect this payment in advance is simple!!
We use Honeybook to send our invoices, and can schedule when the payments are due by.
If a client already has a current contract and invoice schedule to pay for our wedding photography service, this travel fee invoice can be associated with that document for easier reference (for both us and the client!).
If you want to learn more about Honeybook, check out our review: Honeybook – A Comprehensive Review for Photography Business Owners. If you just want to dive in and explore it yourself, sign up with this link to receive 50% off your first year.
Last Words
Figuring out our wedding package prices was easier than sorting out how to charge for travel.
One of the difficulties we really encountered came in the form of wanting to be as upfront about costs as possible – which is why we have our pricing listed on our photography business website. While it’s maybe not unexpected, sometimes prospective clients don’t realize just how much of an impact travel costs can make on their overall costs. This is especially true for clients who are really budget conscious.
At the end of the day, whether you decide to charge a travel fee or not, you need to be sure you are earning enough money from your service to make it worthwhile for you. This is the one simple thing we keep in mind every time we have to look at our pricing, travel fees, and day-to-day finances in general, and it helps us to better make decisions – including the hard one’s like saying “no” to a prospective client wanting a discount.